We derive minimax rates for estimation in anisotropic smoothness classes. This rate is attained by a coordinatewise thresholded wavelet estimator based on a tensor product basis with separate scale parameter for every dimension. It is shown that this basis is superior to its one-scale multiresolution analog, if different degrees of smoothness in different directions are present.; As an important application we introduce a new adaptive wavelet estimator of the time-dependent spectrum of a locally stationary time series. Using this model which was resently developed by Dahlhaus, we show that the resulting estimator attains nearly the rate, which is optimal in Gaussian white noise, simultaneously over a wide range of smoothness classes. Moreover, by our new approach we overcome the difficulty of how to choose the right amount of smoothing, i.e. how to adapt to the appropriate resolution, for reconstructing the local structure of the evolutionary spectrum in the time-frequency plane.

With this article we first like to give a brief review on wavelet thresholding methods in non-Gaussian and non-i.i.d. situations, respectively. Many of these applications are based on Gaussian approximations of the empirical coefficients. For regression and density estimation with independent observations, we establish joint asymptotic normality of the empirical coefficients by means of strong approximations. Then we describe how one can prove asymptotic normality under mixing conditions on the observations by cumulant techniques.; In the second part, we apply these non-linear adaptive shrinking schemes to spectral estimation problems for both a stationary and a non-stationary time series setup. For the latter one, in a model of Dahlhaus on the evolutionary spectrum of a locally stationary time series, we present two different approaches. Moreover, we show that in classes of anisotropic function spaces an appropriately chosen wavelet basis automatically adapts to possibly different degrees of regularity for the different directions. The resulting fully-adaptive spectral estimator attains the rate that is optimal in the idealized Gaussian white noise model up to a logarithmic factor.